The operator said: “Yes, sir. Room nine-o-six. Mr. Mayo.”
Drake said: “Thank you,” and hung up. He told Nicky: “Mayo’s out; we’ll try him first. Nine-o-six — that’s Miss Carrigan’s floor. Amorous Carrigan.”
He grinned, rubbed his blunt chin with nicotined fingers, snapped them suddenly before him. “Not so tough to crash it if she’s on duty. Nicky, you go down to the lobby and hang around the elevators. When you see Pete Mayo come in ring nine-o-six on the dot. Got that?”
“Nine-o-six,” Nicky nodded. “Right.” His face clouded a little. “I don’t like it, boss. Suppose you find dough; how you gonna prove it was Madigan’s? And this Mayo is tough. I hear a yarn he’s a killer down from Detroit. Bad boy. If—”
Drake said contemptuously: “He’s a little rat. As for the money — we plan from that when we find out where it is. If things break—” He stopped, shrugged, beckoned Nicky out to the corridor.
Several minutes later he left the elevator at the ninth floor, stepping into a small reception room ornately carpeted, with a small desk at one side behind which a stout woman of forty, with plump rosy cheeks, sat reading an evening paper.
Drake smiled widely, advancing. “Miss Carrigan,” he cried, heartily. “Well, well, well! How are you?”
The floor clerk blinked surprisedly, took a moment to look coy. She squealed in a flutter of emotion: “But it’s Mr. Drake! Oh, I’m so glad to see you! But I had hoped you’d be on my floor this time, too. I want to take care of my boys.” She smiled archly.
Drake lied gallantly, shrewdly: “I hoped so, too. But they stuck me upstairs, on the twelfth.
“By the way, Miss Carrigan, Mr. Mayo isn’t in, is he?” He smiled confidentially, bent closer. “We’re going to play a little joke on Pete — Mr. Mayo. You know—” He waved his hand vaguely, smiling at her, winked one eye meaningly.
“I know it’s against the rules, but if you could let me have the pass key to his room for just a few moments—”
Miss Carrigan looked doubtful, then wavered, surrendered, under the warmth of his smile.
Drake took the key not too quickly, contrived to look pleasant and good naturedly mysterious, and escaped into the corridor with a last meaning nod. Outside Mayo’s room he looked at his watch. Half past eleven. If Mayo came home from the Haystack early—
The lock yielded easily, without sound. He groped for the switch on the wall, found it, and light swooped at a click after instantly banished darkness.
He went first to the closet door and yanked it open, pulling forth the two dark leather traveling bags it contained. They were unlocked, half empty, and he thumbed rapidly through the contents. There was nothing interesting.
He drew out the dresser drawers, tossing aside shirts, underwear, handkerchiefs. He found nothing. There was a bathroom at one side and he crossed to this and went in. Behind the mirror the white metal cabinet contained the usual toilet things. Nothing else. Drake fingered them irritably, flipped through the Turkish towels on the rack, and turned back. Two paces out he stopped.
Pete Mayo was in the bedroom, with his small, well-tailored back against the closed corridor door. He was dressed in a tuxedo, with a black banded straw hat on his head. He was frowning a little — a very tiny brow contraction of puzzlement. There was a revolver in his right hand. He said to Drake: “Sit down.”
Drake shrugged, feeling like a petty thief, started to speak as the phone on the bedside table tinkled out over his words. Watching him, Pete Mayo stepped the two paces to it. He said: “Hello,” in his hard, recognizable voice when his left hand brought it up to his lips.
Drake heard a staccato mutter from the other end. Nicky, of course. What in hell had kept him? Now...
Pete Mayo put down the receiver without saying anything else. His palely abstracted eyes glided over the room, the heaps of clothing on the floor, the open closet door and the two gaping traveling bags. He said again, looking at Drake: “Sit down.” When Drake didn’t move, Mayo’s narrow body seemed to contract, to tense and draw in without motion. It became hard, compact, purposeful, and when he spoke his flat voice was toneless. He said: “I don’t tell you again.”
Drake suddenly saw madness in the small exquisite features; in their white glistening sheen something flamed paler and more merciless than fire. He realized in the instant that he moved to obey that Pete Mayo would shoot — that Pete Mayo wanted to shoot.
He was cold, not afraid, wary. He sat down. Crossing to him, behind him, Pete Mayo’s steps were soundless, light, as if there were no weight in his body. He said: “Put your hands behind you.” Drake obeyed, felt a thin loop fasten about his wrists, grow tighter until the edge of it sliced into his flesh.
He moved suddenly, knocking his chair back, jerking his body to one side as he fell. Metal flashed in the light above him, crushed hard, cold, on to his skull. He felt no pain. Red light streamed like drunken lightning across his eyeballs, burst in a crimson glow that expanded and covered the room.
When he could see again he was on the floor, on his side, his head pushed against the cold metal roller of the bed. His legs were bent up a little, fastened to his arms. Someone seemed to beat with a great muffled hammer at the inside of his skull. It was very painful.
His eyes roamed dully around the room, picked out Pete Mayo’s slender form before the dresser. The pale man was silent, attentive to the cord held in his widely separated hands, snapping it once, twice. He turned to Drake.
The perfect oval of Mayo’s face was absorbed, very white. His arms, his legs, moved in a delicate precision as he crossed the rug. He knelt before Drake, turning Drake’s bound body until it rested on its back.
Drake stared up at the ceiling cluster of bulbs, watched them contract, dim, flow out and expand to an enormous brilliance. The hammer kept thudding inside his skull, and he felt the blows of it all over his body like a heart beating with intolerable force. He could not think clearly; a formless surge of dark gray rolled forward and back in alternate waves inside his skull.
He shook his head, annoyed. He tried to speak to Pete Mayo. He wanted to ask him what the hell was the matter. But something soft and bulky was forced far back in his mouth, parting his jaws, rubbing coarsely against his tongue. The sound Drake made was hoarse, moaning.
Pete Mayo lifted Drake’s head, passed something under it, put it back. The something was slender, ridged. Drake rolled his eyes down heavily and saw one of the small white hands on either side of his neck. The hands were bent palm to him, with the fingers clenched down on the thing they held. Pete Mayo crossed wrists, transferred the cord ends from one to the other. He began to breathe very fast.
He drew his arms apart slowly. The cord slid a bit on Drake’s throat, then tightened. The monstrous hammer stopped beating inside his head and his body, below the neck, grew intensely hot. Trying to move, to struggle, he discovered in the queer fog of his mind that he could no longer breathe. Above him the milky white balls of Pete Mayo’s eyes spread with a steady growth over the paleness of each iris, leaving them blank, horrible.
Fire scorched Drake’s throat, biting at the tissue. He twisted his head, threw back his body madly, writhed on the floor. Pete Mayo was laughing; his arms tensed and drew wider; the complete whiteness of his eyes gave to his face the expression of an idiot.
Drake’s mind swam down and down, became infinitesimal in the giant’s stature of his body that seemed to fill the room, to tower and broaden in the swirling streams of brilliant light that circled him in the empty space of soaring. For a moment the lights cleared, and the pain stopped. He could see. He was quite peaceful, calm. He could see the mad laughter, the madder exultation in the narrow, insane face of Pete Mayo above him. Then the lights came again, and faded slowly, silently, to grayness.